If the price was the only problem, you'd still expect to see people playing draft regularly, at least in the interim, especially since there are free drafts you can play. But there's more wrong with this game than just how they priced it.<p>It may be that RNG is actually less of a factor in Artifact than in other similar games, but boy does it FEEL stronger. Every turn in a CCG lets you draw cards, and maybe you don't get the card you need, but maybe your opponent didn't also, you don't know, but instantly. But in Artifact, every turn drops creeps in the lanes for both you and your opponent, so you can instantly see if RNG has blessed you or cursed you.<p>It doesn't even feel great to win when RNG is on your side sometimes. Your opponent has built a huge bruiser in an early lane that will just demolish you there and win the game, except a creep spawns in front of him, blocking all that damage. I mean, I didn't do that, that was just luck. I didn't make a good play or build a good deck to get that one extra turn, I just got lucky with creep spawns.<p>Sure, there's definitely more around it that got me to that point where I <i>could</i> get lucky, I understand that, but that other work doesn't feel emphasized, the last-second luck does.<p>And the biggest failure of the Artifact team isn't in the design of this, it's the hubris of not listening to the players complaining about it. It doesn't matter if you build the fairest CCG in the land, if it feels like swingy garbage, nobody's going to play it and it's going to fail. Standing above in their white tower, yelling down "but the math says you're wrong" doesn't matter if nobody's having any fun.